Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Fiction • Winter 2014 - Trial
Officers Nebsky and Hallahan retrieved the money during a routine car stop, down Ocean Parkway coming off the Belt, heading west towards Coney Island. The car had been going 70 miles per hour at the end of the avenue, running three red lights. They had been nearly off-duty—they were already on their way back to the precinct—Officer Hallahan had never been in this situation before, and he did what Officer Nebsky told him. The money was in a black garbage bag in the trunk of the car. The driver, a lean man about 6 foot one, 6 foot two, from what they could estimate when he folded out of the car, was cool and collected, even when they asked to see license and registration, even when they asked if he minded if they took a look in his trunk. His name was Paulson Denihew, and he was, in fact, 6 foot four, according to his license. While Officer Nebsky ran Denihew’s license back in their squad car, Denihew asked Officer Hallahan if he might take off his suit jacket, though it was winter, the end of a day of cold sun. Officer Hallahan obliged this request, and Denihew carefully removed his jacket, revealing a perfectly pressed white dress shirt underneath it, the pearly textured kind that Officer Hallahan knew must have cost at least 400 or 500 dollars—he had uncles who worked on Wall Street. Denihew folded the jacket over his wrist and he and Officer Hallahan waited for Officer Nebsky.
Fiction • Spring Summer 2022
Of this I can be certain: Liam’s head is swiveled east, away from the remains of the sunset, where what was April 15th, 2012 is saying adios and leaving a wide loud wipe of pinkish residue in its wake. The building that Liam is looking at is tall, rectangular, shore-colored; squares pop on yellow-white as the day recedes. Liam counts five windows illuminated. Six. The aluminum report of contact: Liam whips to watch the ball slice past the third baseman – bounce, catch, runner rounds to second, left fielder throws to second baseman to cut him off, runner’s back at first. Liam’s in right field. Come back, he is saying to himself: what if the batter hadn’t pulled it? He does the mental equivalent of slapping himself in the face to wake up. Say that guy had swung later: the ball would bounce past first, trace its erratic path back to the fence, and the hard cork on chain-link would articulate in a clink – that sound that only he can hear while all of his teammates, his mother, everyone else in the stands watch what is basically a silent-movie comedy reel, where he’s running back and trying to grab the ball while it bounces and rolls all over the place. And Shit, shit, shit, he’d be saying to himself, hearing the cardial fury of his just-awakened heart, the hush of the ball rolling away from him on stiff St. Augustine grass.
Features • Commencement 2013
Giacomo applies a pen to the paper napkin, sketching a circle and tearing the tissue at the ends of his marks.
“And like this?”
“We’d say full moon,” I tell him.
We are at a house in L’Aquila, and it is the end of the summer.
“*Plenilunio*,” he responds.
Giacomo is my host father in Italy the summer I turn seventeen. We are all spending a weekend in a city some distance from the family’s hometown of Rieti.
Giacomo was not really his name, I should say. I could only remember that maybe it started with a G, so I’ve named him after my father’s grandfather.
“And this?”
“That’s a crescent moon.”
It is a warm evening and we have just finished dinner out behind the house. Maybe the town is not L’Aquila. This morning I asked the old boyfriend from those years if I mentioned the town or the man’s name in any of the emails I sent him that summer, which I’ve lost.
He said I hadn’t, but recommended the name Giuseppe.
Giacomo, or Giuseppe, draws another crescent moon.
“And this?”
“That’s a crescent moon,” I repeat.
He indicates that I had said that about the other one.
“They’re both crescent moons. They’re the same.”
“They are not the same.”
We must be speaking a language between English and Italian. It’s likely that he is speaking English and that I am speaking Italian, except for the translated lunar phases. My host mother would often chide him for practicing his English with me, since I was there to learn.
The two images look the same to me.
“They are not the same.”
The two moons he has drawn are mirror images, a fact I overlook because there is no linguistic distinction between them in common English. I feel foolish when I realize. They had seemed truly identical to me.
In Italian, the one bowed towards the right is a luna crescente, like ours. The left is a luna calante, or declining moon. We would say waxing and waning. The Italian terms make more sense: crescent, like crescendo or increase, implies that the moon is inflating towards its full circle. *Waxing crescent* and *waning crescent* are respectively redundant and contradictory.
I double-checked with my father that his grandfather’s name was Giacomo.
The point of this story is that you can stare at something for a long time and overlook its obvious qualities.
* So, I used to spend a lot of nights looking at the moon, to get a sense of the surface of the moon. You’ve got the maps, but because of the reflective properties of it, you can only see one small section at a time. As it goes from waxing to waning, the line from dark to light moves across the surface, and you can only see it at the line because of the direct light.
**You had to go out there for two months of the summer to be able to see it.*
In 1961, America needed something to capture its collective imagination. Yuri Gagarin, on behalf of the Soviets, had just become the first human to orbit the planet, and America was flagging in the space race. The next year, Kennedy made his Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort, in which he famously said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...” It was a sweltering Texas day when he delivered the speech, and it was a hot Florida night when Apollo 11 took off, seven years and two presidents later. Not that it mattered past the launch: There’s no weather on the moon, just shadow.
It was an era of discord, of race riots, a downward-turning economy, and a war in Vietnam. It was easy to argue that the moon project was frivolous—that putting money towards the space program was ludicrous when there was still poverty in America. Other proposed projects for the money included public school lunches. But the moon became Kennedy’s frontier. My father says that his own working class family, with his mother as the notable exception, was skeptical about the whole thing for a while.
*Well, ever since Kennedy in his inauguration talked about putting a man on the moon Before This Decade Is Out, the whole space program was a top of mind thing. There were missions every few months. The sort of anti-Communist thing, the Space Race with the Russians, was less compelling than the idea that this was some kind of prophecy. Manifest Destiny. They used to stop class for us to watch rocket launches.
** It comes into consciousness with me when Glenn takes off and they interrupt Romper Room and I’m annoyed and my grandmother snaps and says, “Hey, this is history. Watch it.”*
Dr. Abe Silverstein was reading a book of mythology at home in 1960 when he chose the name Apollo for the manned missions to the moon and back. “Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.”
Grand and dangerous, pulling the sun across the sky is no easy task. Take the story of Phaethon. There are many versions, but the one in Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* goes like this: Apollo had a son with a woman named Clymene, and the son grew up without knowing the god. The son, Phaethon, doubted that Apollo was his father, so he traveled to the palace of the sun to ask. Apollo welcomed him, and promised Phaethon any favor to banish his doubts. Phaethon immediately asked to drive his father’s chariot for one day. Apollo tried to dissuade him, arguing that even Jupiter could not control the team of horses or ride against the momentum of the turning sky. Along the track were the beasts of the constellations: Taurus, Sagittarius, Cancer. Apollo feared for his son, and asked that Phaethon look him in the face and instead accept his *patrio metu*, fatherly anxiety, as proof of his paternity.
Phaethon, however, insisted. Apollo had made a promise, and could do nothing but implore his son to reign the horses firmly and follow the wheel marks in the sky.
When the horses left the earth, they felt the lighter load of Apollo’s son and immediately strayed from the track, setting fire to normally cold constellations and—when Phaethon dropped the reigns—scorching the fields, cities and nations below. The earth herself implored Jupiter to end the catastrophe, and since the clouds and rain had been burned away, Jupiter’s only choice was to demolish the chariot. He launched a lightning bolt at Phaethon, who then fell, burning, from the sky. He was buried with the inscription:
*hic situs est phaethon currus auriga paterni
**quem si non tenuit magnis tamen excidit ausis*
Here lies Phaethon, driver of his father’s chariot
which, though he could not manage, he
nevertheless fell from a deed of great daring.
The technology the ancients used to get to the moon would be like doing it today with pocket calculators.
*There’s always this beep. The Federal regulation says there has to be a tone every twenty-five, thirty seconds. Finally they open the door, video, you see him taking steps down the ladder. He pauses at the bottom of the ladder and says, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and then takes a step on the moon.
** And I didn’t realize at the time: he kind of blew the line. It’s supposed to be “a man.”
But then they kind of change the camera around so you can see they’re actually on the moon, see them hopping around like bunny rabbits. You can see they’re starting to have fun with it. Pogoing. They unfurl the flag—it’s got a wire thing in it to keep it out. And it was just great.*
That we even have a moon is a peculiar feature of our planet. Moons are uncommon on planets close to their stars, because the massive pull of a sun far overwhelms the rocky bodies that immediately surround it. The moon also has an unusual composition: a rock with no metal, the same density as our mantle, it is larger and lighter than the more common moons of the outer planets, which are often composed of passing solar system debris picked up and looped into orbit.
The reigning speculation as to why the moon is there is the giant impact hypothesis, which postulates that a large, Mars-sized object hit Earth four and a half billion years ago. A singularly unlikely event. The impact would have been sufficiently powerful to heat the Earth enough to melt its surface and essentially splash planetary material out into space, where it would accrete into a satellite as it circled the earth.
The presence of this large satellite stabilizes the Earth’s axial rotation; it does not wobble far from its twenty-three and a half degree tilt. This creates the climate consistency that allows for the evolution of complex, multi-cellular organisms. The reliable rhythms of the planet’s water throughout its history are thanks in large part to the moon. Without it, it is unlikely that life as we know it would have formed.
* They’re doing all these collections they had to do. I think the guy hit a golf ball, you know, and that’s it! It was kind of dumb, just a flag and the guys doing a moonbounce. But it was exhilarating, and there was also a sense of peace.
When I think of it in retrospect, there was a sense of peace that came from it. Deep. An abiding sense of peace.*
On their 1968 mission, the Apollo 8 astronauts were able to take a picture of the whole earth from the moon—the first picture of its kind. The most famous image of the earth though, *Blue Marble*, was taken four years later. In his thesis for Reed College, *Dao of Dasein*, Ahmed Moharram Kabil collected responses to such a perspective from figures such as the Dalai Lama: “The image of a blue planet floating in deep space, glowing like the full moon on a clear night, brought home powerfully to me the recognition that we are indeed all members of a single family sharing one little house.” Or Heidegger: “I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.”
Such an image has the potential to be both a totalizing and alien experience. A photograph of the planet from an exterior body, the moon, both unifies and otherizes the Earth. It emphatically declares that it is an object: one of many.
*You just never saw edges like that on earth, you know. There’s something different or beautiful about it. The purity of the color. So that was my **experience of the moon in 1969.
And you know partly it’s self-referential and partly it was social and partly it was aesthetic. But in the end I think you know the landing itself felt transient and it was a way of focusing on this object that was kind of strange and beautiful.*
My father was eleven years old when Apollo 11 launched. I called him because I was writing about the moon and I wanted to hear a first-hand account of the landing.
*So we’re out visiting my father and his wife Loretta. I loved Loretta because she was very kind to us. It was pretty good living because my mother—my father had this apartment, it was a corner apartment which was cool. It looked out over Great South Bay. It was a hot night. We didn’t have air conditioning, so the windows were open.
** My father is there, he’s excited, because he was a jet pilot in the sixties, and this was just the ultimate. Like oh God, that could have been me. He was fascinated and excited by it, but also down on himself.
Loretta’s making us food and keeping things fun.
We’re all sitting in this big queen-sized bed, waiting for this thing to happen.*
* With grateful acknowledgement to Charles Langmuir’s How to Build A Habitable Planet for information about the moon’s formation and planetary effects, and to NASA’s website for details about the Apollo missions. *
Poetry • Winter 2015 - Possession
To live as others do should have been easier,
as easy as falling off the overhang
of a slippery cliff, with help from a log.
My tusks had been holding you up. I am sorry for it.
The most dangerous place in the world
is the world, or becomes the world
after you have to flee into it. Even the cap
of an acorn, or the wind-distributed promise
of a future accord, will do, since all families are
adoptive, or they are failed families, or they are both,
as wind chimes need the wind
to tell what they falsely believe to be “their own story”;
the echoes in that cavern must also do justice
to the last chipmunks on earth. They fell in love,
delighting the birthday party, who saw it all
last year (age median: eight and a half). We hold
their hypothetical findings at a distance
until we realize we are in there too,
in the freezing not-quite-
forever of an artificial-
butter-and-paste-scented theater, where everything rings
and nothing gets picked up, and you have to hunt
your own critters if you want critters, to get out
and then sneak back in with some help from that freaky invention
your sister called “fire.” And that’s why we never came home.
Features • Winter 2016 - Danger
I stood in the backyard in Berkeley (behind the tree, next to Marion’s easel and paints) and flicked off the little red safety.
Marion was inside, in our dirty kitchen, heating water for pasta while dicing sausage for sauce. *If I don’t come back in a few minutes*, I had told her, *something is wrong*. She had laughed at me.
I pointed the capsule towards the ground. I offered a licked finger to the wind, but it didn’t cool. It was a still July evening in the East Bay. *Check for a breeze*, my boyfriend Jared had told me, and then you can test it. *You won’t be able to use it when you need it if you don’t test it. *
I wrapped the capsule’s Velcro handle around my fingers, and pushed the trigger down.
Not much happened. A stream of liquid coursed out. Fixated, I held the plastic down a little too long, then pulled my finger up too slowly at the end—the fluid dribbled, pooled on the ground. A successful test, and now I knew. It only took one press of the button: brief, decisive. The packaging said the capsule contained 20 sprays, and that one had been worth maybe 2. At the end of the summer, I still had 18 left.
I flicked the little red safety on, and went back inside the house. I tucked the capsule into a pocket of my purse, easily accessible to desperate hands, and went into the kitchen to help Marion with the sauce.
***
The active ingredient in pepper spray is oleoresin capsicum, an oily resin that makes eyes burn and swell shut. It’s the same stuff that makes a good salsa. Last spring, chopping jalapeños for chili, I got a little juice on my hands and forgot to wash them. Thirty minutes later, after an absentminded rub of the eyes, I found myself bent double over a gushing sink, trying desperately to pry my eyelids open so I could flush them out. It felt like I was going blind. Even when I managed to force my lashes up, light and air made my whites and pupils sizzle, my vision blur. This pain came down to capsaicinoids, the compounds that make up oleoresin capsicum and determine its strength. The habeñero pepper rates 350,000 Scoville heat units. Pepper spray rates over five million.
A 1994 US Department of Justice report makes a strong argument for pepper spray as a weapon. It’s more potent than mace, affecting not only on the eyes, but the breath— inhaled spray swells mucous membranes along airways. Pepper spray rarely kills but almost always incapacitates, providing a viable alternative to guns and even tasers. Unlike tear gas, it works just as deftly on the drugged and drunk. It doesn’t linger on clothes; ventilation, soap, and water clean it right up. It’s great for riot control but banned in international war.
Civilians have access to the same caliber of pepper spray that law enforcement officials do. Sometimes it’s misused, but not often. Another Department of Justice report, last updated in 2011, documents 63 cases of death in police-civilian interactions where pepper spray was involved. Of these cases, most credited the cause of death to heart conditions or drug overdoses. In the few cases where pepper spray did link closely to victim death, causing positional asphyxia, it did so by exacerbating pre-existing asthma or other respiratory conditions.
***
I bought the spray last summer while working in the Tenderloin, a pocket of San Francisco named for an analogous neighborhood in New York City. Urban myth credits the name to a ‘hazard pay’ bonus for law enforcement officials, cash that the cops put towards fine cuts of meat. There are other namesake rumors: paid-off bribes (more money to eat well) and prostitute thighs (a different kind of flesh).
Bad things happen everywhere. This is what I tell my nervous grandparents every time I pack a suitcase. One gathers stray caresses in Prague public squares, shares bedrooms with suspicious strangers in São Paulo hostels. But men also follow footsteps in the heart of affluent Cambridge, and malls get shot-up in my own small Oregonian town. Really, no city is immune. One must travel anyway.
The Tenderloin’s statistics, while troubling, are brighter than Rio’s or Harlem’s. And yet, this place shook me; it scared me.
The first day I went into the office, I mistakenly exited BART a few blocks too far from the building. To get where I needed to be, I had to cut through Civic Center-UN Plaza.
Civic Center-UN Plaza is officially the home of the glistening San Francisco United Nations building, bounded on one end by a city hall on a hill. Unofficially, it’s home to a huge encampment of homeless men, women, and children. There are needles in arms, wheelchairs, rooted up trash cans, women in short skirts soliciting, women in long skirts screaming. There is hunger there, the pervasive smell of urine. Cops with large guns stand outside the government buildings, surveying the squalor with guns slung across their chests. It’s far from a slum. There are theaters in the Tenderloin, and restaurants, and schools. Still, it is something to break a heart: to watch the men with briefcases and women in blazers walking at a clip, brushing off need like a pesky fly; to crane a neck at those government palaces, looking down on their Americans with chilled apathy.
The first day I went to the office, I was wearing a knee length skirt. That day I would learn that this look was too formal for the office’s casual vibe—and also, that this was much too much leg to go incognito. I had my phone in my hand (big mistake) cluelessly staring at a map. By the time I got to the center of the Plaza, and realized that I should have traced the perimeter, it was too late to stop.
“Hey beautiful,” a man leered, lurching in front of me. Whistles sprouted from points on the square. The sun was bright. I vaguely processed, heart throbbing, that I was getting too much attention. Too many eyes were on my legs, and on my purse. It was 10 am (I had been asked to come in late that day) so no other employee was out on the street. I was being followed, surrounded. Stubble floated in and out of my vision, deep voices in and out of my ears. I tried to decide: Should I smile? Should I frown? Which would provoke less of a response? I made it to the door of the building, fumbled with the lock. When the surly security guard let me in, I was sweating.
My least favorite part of each day was walking to and from work. Sitting at my cubicle, time ticking towards 4 o’clock release, I would shiver at the screams wafting up from the sidewalk—the cries of one woman, the same each day. My second day, walking from office to BART with a fellow intern, I made eye contact with a woman sitting on the ground. She stood, yelled, and pitched trash at me, hitting the side of my face. I covered my head with my purse and power walked for the BART entrance. The next week, I watched a man pick up a needle and inject it into his arm at the bottom of the subway stairs.
To get to and from my house in Berkeley, I walked down Shaddock Avenue, away from the tourist ice cream shops and into quieter residential areas. A man got down on his knees and proposed, citing my smile and eyes as rationale for wanting to marry me. A man on a bike shrieked as he careened into my path, shirtless and wild-haired. Two men called out to me as I strolled to work; when I didn’t look back at them, they whispered “bitch, you bitch” and wove through the crowd to keep up with me. I picked up my pace. That was usually my tactic: move faster.
I hate to admit how scared I was—I, who carry a stamped passport, I, who know the tactics to defend myself—a poke to the eye, a knee to the groin—and the right words to yell—‘Fire!’ or ‘Get away from me!’—and the wrong things to do—no solo taxi rides late at night, don’t wear your flashiest jewels on BART, don’t engage anyone on the street in conversation. The experiences I catalogued were disconcerting, but I know (and knew then) that they were far from true horrors.
I felt elitist in my fear, petty for wanting to protect myself. These were people without access to toilets or nutritious food, people with yellow eyes and sallow skin. Most of those who yelled at me were obviously out of their minds—schizophrenics, or deranged from drugs. My fear didn’t strip me of compassion, but it did make it impotent. Instead of handing out bottles of water and Band-Aids, I was scuffing past the debris, secluding myself in a cubicle, getting away from it all at any cost. On the train, I thought about the Gospel healings—equating the lepers and spirit-possessed screamers of Galilee to the junkies in the Tenderloin. What a thing it would be to make illnesses jump into pigs, to make this nation well.
***
Pepper spray is legal in all 50 states. In some, like my home Oregon, that’s a general ‘go ahead;’ in others, it’s qualified. In California, I could order a capsule on Amazon, provided I was over 18 and purchasing less than 2.5 liquid ounces. Most of the regulations are of the non-minor, non-felon sort. Many states restrict carrying in public places like schools. Of course, abuse is a crime, and pepper spray cannot be carried onto planes.
When I returned to Boston with spray in hand this fall, a local told me I was a criminal, that you needed a firearms permit to carry pepper spray or mace in Massachusetts, and that you could only purchase them from a registered firearms dealer. That regulation has changed, though; the local was ill-informed. As of September 2014, a provision in a new piece of state gun legislation makes it no longer necessary to carry a permit to buy. (Massachusetts had previously been the only state with such a rule in place.) You still have to buy from a dealer, and you can’t order through the mail.
The other interns in my office carried pepper spray. My parents advised me to get some. But ultimately, I ordered a capsule of Sabre because Jared asked me to. He came to visit me for a week, walked my streets. We ate yellow curry in Berkeley, hiked from Ghirardelli Square to the Golden Gate Bridge. We also went to my office together. After his plane ride home, I received an email. It contained several links to Amazon pages.
*Please, please buy at least one of these. They cost practically nothing and they're a good investment for you even post-San Francisco, since you'll almost certainly be jogging and commuting in urban environments.I do think it will make you feel a little more secure and empowered. *
*I want you to get serious about learning to defend yourself. *
***
Growing up, my dad kept a baseball bat under my parents’ bed. He has retained all his muscles and used to play shortstop in high school. I have no doubt he could seriously wound or even kill an intruder with a few fell swings.
When I walk through a parking lot after a late night movie, I hold my car key between my fingers, ready to enter into an eye or slide up a nostril. In middle school, us girls sat on the gym floor with the physical education teacher and identified other common purse items that could be used as weapons: a comb, an uncapped pen.
My grandfather has owned guns all my life. He takes them to the Alaskan wilderness to hunt, hangs the heads of the animals around his pole barn.
But baseball bats are for baseball, keys are for driving, combs for brushing, pens for writing, and in this case, guns for hunting. There was something different about buying this spray.
What does it mean to carry something meant for hurting, and only for hurting? To carry it from a house in Berkeley, through the stiff air of the subway, down the blocks of the Tenderloin, into Celtic Coffee to get a Thai iced tea, and into a law school where women wear pearls?
On a practical level, it would mean simply this: if someone came at me with a knife, or a gun, or a bicep, on my way to work or going home or going out, I would have a few extra seconds to escape, to shout for help, to get out my phone and dial three numbers. And that felt good. That’s why women buy this little container of liquid: to keep us out in the streets, going to work for legal think tanks, and having fun with friends.
On a philosophical level, it felt strange, even wrong. Nothing happened to me that summer in San Francisco except those catcalls—at most, there was the incident with the trash. I always walked to work in daylight. I never witnessed any crimes.
And yet, I learned to avoid the inconvenience of others’ suffering—even though doing so made my conscience groan. I always picked a man in a suit to follow. I covered my wide eyes with sunglasses, and cast them down. I converted my nervous smile to a flatline frown. I never held my phone outside of my bag, and I clenched that zippered bag under an arm. I wore pants instead of skirts. I took the shortest way around the block. I held my breath to keep the urine stench out. I waited eagerly for market days, where the plaza was filled with stalls of zucchini and berries and I was assured an undisturbed walk. And I had that little canister in my purse: tested, ready to really hurt someone, someone on the kinds of drugs and with the kind of lung conditions one acquires from living outside that, with oleoresin capsicum in the mix, could maybe, it’s possible, result in death.
***
There are plenty of make-it-yourself pepper sprays on the Internet. Most recipes require crushed chili peppers and ground black pepper, heated and strained. Some claim Tabasco sauce will do the trick. Generally, the comments are more horrifying than the instructions.
*If a man dares to hurt me or rape me then I would do everything I could and if he goes blind he deserves it. He's evil and should be punished. If he's blind he will never do it again that's for sure.*
* *
*A knife would be backup to the pepper spray in case that does not subdue them.*
* *
*This pepper spray is a good one to use on incoming border crossers btw.*
There’s fear here, and perverted righteousness, too. I don’t trust the administrators of that justice—including myself.
***
As we strolled from a Tenderloin theater, a man grabbed my friend Ben by the arm, clung to it like a child, and wished him Happy Birthday again and again. The week before I arrived, Civic Center bloodied with an afternoon shooting and a woman named Kate was killed on the piers. One July day, there was a stabbing on the BART line I took to Berkeley; someone had knifed a transit employee while he stood post in his booth.
Nothing out of the ordinary for a city, but just enough to sustain my fear. It fed on of urban myths about meat and newspaper headlines about violence, on the worries of those who loved me, on possibilities. Fear settled itself over innocents, fogged my judgment. Nothing happened to me, and I did nothing. I rode BART in guilt. Women slumped in their seats trying to sleep, men with black garbage sacks mumbled songs to themselves, and I tried to focus on my book. Making eye contact would probably be okay—but what if it wasn’t? So I didn’t.
The pepper spray felt ridiculous. Could I even whip out the capsule in time, flick off that safety, press the button for the right duration and with the right force, when I really needed to? I wasn’t sure if I could. I was glad that I had it, sometimes: when the sky got dusky, or I heard the “bitch” whispers snaking behind me. The pragmatist rejoiced at those moments. Of course, I could hurt them if I needed to. I could and I would, I told myself. It was legal, I was exercising my shot at self-defense. But the idealist was saddened by my acquiescence to fear—my impulse to fight off the dangerous world with tooth, nail, and spray. I couldn’t tell how justified that impulse was.
Fiction • Spring 2014
We’d been living in Madero for months of silent siege when I got a toothache on the right side of my mouth. It hurt like hell. I chewed only with the left side of my mouth for ten days while I tried to find a dentist that would take the insurance that Katherine got through the school. Most places didn’t take it because it was cut-rate. You’d think they’d give teachers better benefits. I started to worry that the right side of my face would become sallow and emaciated from lack of use. I knew it probably wouldn’t, but I grew out a beard just in case. I hadn’t grown a beard in several years, and when it came in I was surprised at how much gray was in it. I shaved it right off. I did eventually find a dentist that took the insurance, but his office was in a little town called Venero. It was a half an hour away, in a valley up in the mountains. The only opening was on Friday morning that week. I would have to take a whole day off of work to go. I spent that Thursday framing a house with my foreman Eric. A guy from a neighboring town had done the plumbing the day before, because I was Eric’s only employee and didn’t know how. Eric didn’t like being called the foreman, but I thought it was funny. I liked working construction even though I had to wake up so early. There was something peaceful about the rhythm of it. I liked it much more than wait- ing tables, or tending bar, or moving furniture like I had done in California. When I told Eric that I wasn’t going to be able to come in the next day because of my appointment, he wasn’t happy about it, but there was nothing to do. It wasn’t as if I was playing hooky to have fun. Venero used to be a mining town. The mine was still there, but it employed so few people it wasn’t really reasonable to call it a mining town anymore. At least that’s what Eric told me when I asked him for directions. I had never been. His uncle used to work in the mines, he said. They mined molybdenum, but his uncle didn’t know what the company used it for. To him, it just looked like the lead in pencils. Molybdenum is mixed with steel to make it stronger. I looked it up in the library a couple years ago. When I came home from work that Thursday, Katherine was sitting in the living room. The house was cold. We were in a standoff; neither of us wanted to be the one to turn on the thermostat for the winter. As I sat down on the couch, she got up and walked into the bedroom and closed the door. I went into the kitchen and began making as much noise as I could but she didn’t come out and eventually I got tired and stopped. I sat down at the kitchen table. She came into the kitchen a little later and poured herself a glass of white wine. As she walked back to the bedroom, she spilled a little wine on my sleeve. I knocked the chair over as I stood up. She said it was an accident and that if I was going to yell I could leave the house. I smiled and said that it was fine and then I shut myself in my office until she had gone to bed. That night, my tooth hurt too much to sleep. I tried every trick that I knew of to drift off. Nothing worked. I massaged my cheek with my fingers, which seemed to help, but my hands were so cracked and dry that my cheek began to chafe and so I stopped. I had given up trying to use lotion to make them better, because the lotion made my palms soft and they would rip open when I worked. Katherine didn’t like the lotion. She preferred it when my hands smelled like sawdust. I sat at the kitchen table the whole night, with only a candle for company, but it burned down to a nub and died out. I was left in the silver light of the moon. We’d been fighting a lot. They weren’t loud and fiery fights like we used to have in the old house. I never hurt her. Several times I flipped the kitchen table over onto its side. The first time her grandmother’s vase was on it. The subsequent vases that she put in its place were cheap and from secondhand stores, so breaking them didn’t mean anything and I stopped flipping the table over altogether. I moved on to all the other stuff that made our house our house. When we moved, we didn’t take any of the things we owned. They were all replacements. They didn’t mean anything to us. Our new house is bare. It only has the furniture it came with. These quiet fights were worse though, worse because they were slow and deliberate. Katherine was a master at fighting like that. Not me though, it ruined my digestive system. I didn’t have the nerves. I want to blame Katherine’s drinking for our fighting but that isn’t fair. It wasn’t why we were fighting, and she really only started seriously drinking after we moved to New Mexico. She handles drinking much better than I do. I wasn’t drinking back then; I’m making up for it now. This is how it went: half a bottle of Chardonnay before dinner, half a bottle with dinner, and half a bottle after dinner. Out there, the air was so dry that the chilled bottles didn’t sweat and leave little wet rings when she took them out of the fridge and left them on the table. She was very regimented about it; she didn’t let it affect her career. She woke up every morning, right when I was leaving for the construction site, to get ready for school. The children at school didn’t call her by our last name. They called her Ms. Katherine. When the sun crested the mountains I went into the bedroom to change my clothes and brush my teeth. I wanted to leave before Katherine woke up. She was asleep, but she didn’t look peaceful. Her lips were pursed and her brow was furrowed. When we first met, she kept a dream journal, but she didn’t both- er anymore. She said that she had the same dream over and over—so many times that she had stopped keeping track. I told her she should go see someone about it, but she never did. She said she didn’t dream when she drank. She told me once about the dream. It wasn’t unpleasant. The road to Venero went through the foothills. It went up and down. I had to go as fast as I could on the declines to build up speed for the climbs. My car was little and old and I was worried that it would die. It wasn’t used to high elevation. At the beginning of the drive, at lower altitudes, the aspens which were interspersed with the pine trees had yellow leaves, but as I climbed, they became barren. It seemed to me as though I was driving outside of time, and I didn’t mind the idea of going on forever, climbing and climbing, until everything turned white. As I drove, I thought about how my older brother and I used to hop the fence around the orchards in the fall when the branches were heavy with apples and the leaves were yellow and red. We tried to catch the falling leaves as they zigzagged through the air. We climbed the trees and picked apples to fill our shirts with. We ate until we were swollen and had bellyaches. Then, we would lie under the trees in the dappled afternoon light and drift between napping and talking. Later in the fall, when most of the apples had fallen off of the trees, we would take turns pitching the partially rotten fruit to each other and batting with a branch. My brother’s swing was all wrists. He would cushion the apple with the stick and then flick it, whole, up into the blue afternoon. I didn’t have any finesse and every time I hit I sprayed chunks of apple everywhere and they coated our clothes and it drove our mother crazy. My brother passed away a little while before Katherine and I moved from Menlo Park. It was nothing dramatic. He didn’t even live in the town. One minute he was there in my mind, then the police called and he was gone. It was a stroke. I hadn’t seen him for years, and if they hadn’t called, he would have gone on living in my mind forever. I waited a week or so to tell Katherine. When I did she put down her book and walked over and hugged me from behind. At first I tried to brush her off but she hung on, like she was riding a bull. Suddenly all the fight in me, all the stubbornness, left and I let her hold me. She never said anything about it after that, but when I wanted to move I think she understood. The house, our childhood home, was unbearable for me after he died. I thought that Madero would be the perfect town for us to move to. It was small and quiet. There were mountains and a river. Katherine got a job at the local elementary school and I worked construction. But I didn’t realize how dry it would be and how empty. The sky was huge out there and blue, but the earth was flat, except for the mountains, and there were times, when the wind whipped up and I looked out the window at the expanses of sagebrush and the lonely mountains, that I felt as if I were the only person in the world. The air there was too light and arid, and it almost felt like there was no air at all, that each breath was futile. I arrived in Venero fifteen minutes early for my appointment. The only buildings on the main drag were a couple of houses, a gas station, and a liquor store. At first I thought that I had arrived at the wrong place. The office was in a doublewide mobile home that sat on the ground. It didn’t look like a dentist’s office, but it was the right address. I opened the dusty glass front door and a bell chimed feebly. I don’t really know how to describe the place. There was a small reception area, stocked with old magazines and a slumped couch. Through one door a dentist chair and tools were visible. An old woman sat reading a fading magazine behind the receptionist’s desk. Cages and tanks that were full of small animals occupied the rest of the office, which was most of the space. The carpet was green and there were wood chips everywhere. I remember that the office smelled of disinfectant and cedar and animal urine and the combination stung my nostrils and made me nauseous. I stood in the doorway surrounded by falling dust particles that were illuminated by the beams of light that streamed through the door. The receptionist looked up and greeted me. Her face was deeply wrinkled and her black hair was held tightly back in a bun. She wore shabby clothes and spoke with a thick New Mexican accent. Her teeth were perfectly straight and white. She asked me to fill out some forms but she didn’t have a pen and neither did I. I asked her about the animals and she told me that the dentist ran the only zoo in Venero. She told me too that I was welcome to look at the animals while I waited. Other than us, the office was silent. The cages were stacked against the faux wood walls. The glass on the tanks was smudged and dirty. I walked through the office, looking for some sign of movement. One of the big tanks had a rattlesnake in it, or at least that’s what the plaque on the tank said, because the snake didn’t have a rattle. As I looked at more and more of the animals the more uneasy I felt. The dentist came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped. His hands were strong and weighed heavily on me. He was a tall man with white-blond hair and thick, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore high-waisted jeans and a plaid shirt with a bolo tie. His face was wide and shiny and he smiled with his mouth open and his teeth slightly gapped. He told me that he had caught all the animals himself and that he had the largest collection of monitor lizards in the state. He asked me if I had seen the caiman. I had not. His breath smelled sour. He led me by my shoulder to his prized possession, the one animal not from New Mexico, at the far end of the room, in the biggest tank. I didn’t want to look. He’s beautiful isn’t he, he asked me. I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I looked into the black and beady eyes and could not look away. The caiman was motionless, and for a moment I thought it might actually be stuffed, but there was something alive in its eyes, some malice. The pit of my stomach was cold. We might have been standing there for ten seconds, or ten minutes, and I think I would have kept standing there if the dentist hadn’t turned and told me to follow him into the back room where the dentist chair was. The dentist chair was old and turquoise, ripped on the arms. He sat me down and tucked a bib into my shirt. I was staring at the ceiling, which was stained brown from water that had leaked through the roof. The shelves that lined the walls were filled with animal skulls. They were yellow and they all had big teeth. Under each skull, there was a handwritten label. There was a javelina from Texas and a wild boar from Colorado. There must have been at least a couple dozen of them. I was grateful when he turned on the bright dental light, which blinded me. He injected a lot of Novocaine into my gums. The shot hurt, but soon I could not feel his strong and gloved hands as they moved my jaw. He used a tiny drill and all I could sense was the vibration that it sent through my skull. But I heard the whine of the motor and smelled burning tooth and felt the dust the drill generated at the back of my mouth. I think I would have gone without the Novocaine if I didn’t have to smell that smell. It scared me. He was a good dentist. He worked quickly, and he didn’t ask me any questions. He told me that when he first opened the office children used to come in and look at the animals, but it had been a while since anyone who was not a patient had been in and even the patients no longer took an interest. He lived in a town south of Madero and commuted to Venero a couple of days a week. He told me that he didn’t work in the winters and that he had to pay someone to come in and clean the tanks and feed the animals. He lost a few animals every winter. He didn’t work in Venero in the winters because he was afraid of driving through the mountains on icy and snowy roads back to where he lived. He said, If your car breaks down on those roads in winter, there’s nothing left to do but the dying. He finished his work, switched off the light, and sat me up in the chair. He had a blue surgical mask on. He told me that I was all set and that they would mail me the bill. I thanked him, but could not pro- nounce any of the words because of the Novocaine. When I walked through the main room, I kept my eyes forward and unfocused. On the drive home I kept looking in the mirror. I thought that was what I was going to look like when I was old, when all the vitality had left my body and my skin was loose. I kept poking my cheek with my finger to see if I could feel anything. I couldn’t. I thought about what he said, about dying at night in the mountains, about freezing to death, about numbness. Katherine and I drove when we moved out there in the winter. We only got part of the way on the first day and so we stayed in a hotel in some run-down little town. When we got up in the morning to keep going the windshield was frosted over. We didn’t have an ice scraper—we didn’t know it got that cold in the southwest—so I had to drive with my head to the side, looking out of the little patch of windshield that the weak defroster melted clear. Whenever the highway turned towards the sun the frost on the windshield lit up into a brilliant glow and I could not see a thing and Katherine would begin to fidget nervously. But I kept driving. I got home and walked straight to the bedroom. I lay on top of the covers and fell asleep. I did not have any dreams. When I woke up, the walls were tinted orange from the setting sun. I had drooled all over the pillow. When I walked in to the kitchen Katherine asked me if I was having a stroke because of how the right side of my face sagged. Then she laughed. It wasn’t until dinner that I was certain that I had to go back. Katherine and I sat across from each other at the table with our heads down, looking at our plates. Usually, I tried to ask about her day and talk to her. Dinner was the only time that we could talk, when she was just drunk enough to speak and not drunk enough to be mean. But I didn’t say a word that night. I was thinking about the animals. I thought of the cold wire cages. Even though it scared me, I felt sorry for the caiman. I was chewing, but I was not paying enough attention and my cheek slipped between my teeth and I bit down on it. I did not feel it, but I tasted the blood. I don’t know why I felt that way. Once, when I was a boy, my father and I went on a hunting trip in the Rockies. We flew to Colorado. It was my special trip; my brother didn’t get to come, and it was my first time on a plane. My father had paid for a guide and a crew to take all of our gear. All I had to carry was my rifle. It was a .22. I don’t remember much of the trip anymore-–the camping, the food or any of that-–but I do remember shooting a deer. My .22 wasn’t really supposed to be able to kill anything, but the deer had popped up just in front of us, close enough that the little bullet could do damage. I remember being scared, scared that I would miss when my father whispered for me to shoot and that I would disappoint him. But I shot and hit the deer in the side. It didn’t die right away. It fell to the ground and lay breathing great gulps of air, its pupils so big that its eyes were black and they drew my own eyes with irresistible grav- ity. My father told me to shoot it again, behind the eye, and I did. My father patted me on the back, but I didn’t feel anything, not pride or empathy. I just wanted to go home. I washed the dishes slowly, and when I was done, my hands were wrinkled and peeling. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Katherine to go to bed. She was already done with her drinking for the night, and so it was only a matter of time. As I waited, the Novocaine wore off slowly and my jaw began to ache. It was a dull and pounding pain. Finally Katherine went into the bedroom and closed the door and I was alone. I waited until I thought Katherine was asleep before I snuck into our room. I fumbled through my dresser in the dark and put on a black pair of pants, a black sweatshirt, and running shoes. I guess I made too much noise, or maybe I was acting suspicious all night, because Katherine turned her light on and asked me what I was doing. I told her that I had some business to take care of. I tried to make it sound important. She laughed through her nose. What business do you have, she asked. I told her what I was going to do. I was always honest with Katherine. I was sure that she was going to try and stop me—that she was going threaten to call the cops or turn me in. But she didn’t. She asked if she could come. We got into the car. Katherine wanted to drive, but she was drunk. It was crisp out and the moon was almost full. I drove the same route that I had driven earlier. We didn’t talk on the whole drive, but it didn’t bother me. Katherine rested her head against the window and I wasn’t even sure if she was awake. Under the light of the moon the surroundings were a colorless gradation of gray. Katherine and I used to sit on the fire escape outside of the window of our apartment when we first moved in together. It felt more real, somehow. When we were down on the street surrounded by buildings I felt like I was on a stage and each action was mimed. But on the fire escape we could see the curvature of the earth. We would smoke cigarettes and watch the ashes fall slowly, like leaves. Katherine was afraid of heights and I used to climb on the outside of the railing to scare her. Then she would grab me and hold me close and kiss me. I pulled into the parking lot and turned off the headlights. We got out of the car and Katherine went and tried the front door, which was locked. I had a tire iron in the trunk and I got it out. I had never broken a window before and my first tap on the glass was too soft. Katherine asked if she could try. She put her whole body into the swing and she smashed the window. We both stood still as we waited for an alarm to sound, but the night was silent, other than the soft clicks of the car engine as it cooled. Katherine went and got a flashlight from the glove compartment. I reached through the hole in the window and unlocked the door. When I opened it, the bell chimed and echoed through the dark room. Katherine swept the flashlight around. The soft yellow beam reflected off the tanks. I told her to turn it off so our eyes could adjust. There was enough moonlight to see, if we waited. We stood still in the silence and I heard Katherine’s rapid breathing. When at last our eyes had adjusted, we stepped carefully over the broken glass and made right for the cages. I picked up a tank and walked out the front door. In the silver light it was difficult to see the plaques, which were often cast in shadows and so I didn’t know which animal I was carrying, but it didn’t matter. It was surprisingly heavy. I took the lid off and tipped the tank on its side. I left it like that and went back inside for more. We ferried the animals out one by one, letting them go into the night. It was hard work, the cages were heavy, but my adrenaline was pumping and with each animal we released I grew more invigorated. It seems silly now, but while we were in that office, in the pale moonlight, I thought I fell in love with Katherine all over again. We passed each other as we moved in and out of the door and I caught a whiff of her hair and we brushed shoulders, gently but consciously. With the lighting and the emotion it seemed as though that moment had been spliced in from some reel of film from long-gone days. We had moved almost all the cages, laying them on their sides in rows in the gravel parking lot. I carried one particularly large tank out and took the lid off. As I tilted the tank onto its side, I felt a stinging pain in my right hand. I flung my arm backwards instinctively and the tank fell and shattered. A snake slithered swiftly out of the tank and into the night. The rattlesnake. I put my hand between my thighs and Katherine came running outside to find me on my knees. She asked me what had happened and I explained, the best that I could. Her eyes were wide and she swayed slightly in place as I held my hand up and she looked at the two puncture wounds. I started to suck on the bite, but Katherine pulled my hand away from my mouth. She thought I might poison myself that way. I didn’t know if she was right and so I stopped. Neither of us knew what to do, neither of us knew much about snakes. She wanted to call an ambulance but I told her we couldn’t call 911 from the dentist’s phone because then they would know it was us who had let the animals go. I like to think the snake tried to warn me but couldn’t because it didn’t have a rattle. I like to imagine it shaking its tail vigorously and in vain. After the incident, I looked up everything there was to know about rattlesnakes. I have become an expert. People don’t really die from rattlesnake bites, at least not unless they are in the middle of a desert. The venom takes hours to be lethal. But in that parking lot I didn’t know if I was dying or how much time I had left, which was worse in some ways than knowing for sure. Then at least there is nothing left to do but the dying. My favorite fact about rattlesnakes is that they give birth to live young. The nearest hospital that I knew of was in Madero. I told Katherine that we had to leave. She wanted to drive, but I couldn’t let her because she was drunk. I started the car and the headlights illuminated the whole scene in yellow: the faux stucco, the shattered glass tank, the dark and gaping door to the office. The only animal left inside was the caiman. I put the car in gear and eased onto the road. I leaned over and put my right hand as low on the floor as possible. I knew that slowed the spread of the poison. I was leaning over towards Katherine and had to crane my neck to look out of the window. She reached over and caressed my cheek and I almost jerked away because her fingers were so cold. She stroked my cheek in a way that she hadn’t done in a long time. Beneath her fingers my jaw was aching. With each beat of my heart I thought I could feel the venom advancing up my arm. I thought about what the dentist had said about his car in winter. How much nicer it would be, I thought, to freeze like that, to fall asleep, than if we got stuck now. Katherine would have to watch me and I would have to watch her watch me. There would be no dignity in that. With each hill I held my breath and as we crested it I let it out slowly. Katherine began to cry. I wasn’t sure if she was crying for me because she thought I was dying or for some other reason, and I didn’t ask. She told me that she was sorry, but she didn’t say what for and I felt as though her words were not for me. She asked if I remembered how we had met and for the first time since I was a boy I lied. I couldn’t recall a thing. She said that we were stupid, that this was stupid, to let those animals go. They are probably going to die in the wild, she said. And I knew she was right. She told me that she wished she had been bit too. She said that we both deserved it. The pain was spreading up my arm and my tooth hurt and my neck was sore. My heart felt as hollow and empty as a swallow’s nest and I wanted to get as far away from Katherine as soon as possible, but I was afraid to lift my hand. We got to the hospital and went into the E.R. I was embarrassed when I saw how unconcerned the doctor on call was. We sat on the plastic chairs in the waiting room, Katherine with her head lilting, and me with my chin almost on my chest. I thought about my brother, about how he had gone too quickly, about how he had died in a phone call. I felt as though I had an hourglass emptying sand into my limbs until they were heavy and hard to move. I felt tired. A nurse called my name and I got up and walked towards the double swinging doors. Katherine called out. She asked me if things would get better and I looked into her fearful and bloodshot eyes. Yes, I said and I turned and walked through the doors. Some people think that, when cornered, a rattlesnake will bite itself with suicidal intent. This is not true. When cornered rattlesnakes strike out at anything that moves, including their tails. When they feel yielding flesh beneath their fangs, they will release venom. Rattlesnakes are immune to their own poison and they rarely die from this.
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