Nathaniel Rosenthalis

Hard rain hurts the neck, which is that soft. A part

and guillotine-gullible, but I have been; safe-

Craning backwards, I was warned of bags, big time debris

liable to fall on me (“as if only”). But I report now

bands everywhere for falling onto, like hard

Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Poetry

Hoping for an Opening

Ming Ying

Untitled

Elena Alvarez Guillem

Terra Nova

Kylie Manning

Dog Day (Sehnsucht Series)

Kyra Mo

sublunary

Another Swan

Outside My Certain Sight (Sehnsucht Series)

Samuel Jensen

On the train home from her therapist’s office, the woman made of water tries, desperately, not to slosh onto the teenage girl sitting next to her. Outside, it’s winter in Michigan and has been for several years, but in the train it’s warm, too warm, and as they curl around a bend in the icy Huron River, she foams and spills over into the girl’s lap, her navy slacks and crisp white shirt.

“I’m so, so sorry,” apologizes the woman made of water.

The woman made of water is translucent, swimmy with the color of objects seen through her. Having lived a million years or so, drenching a teenage girl’s business casuals shouldn’t feel like such a big deal, but it does, the woman made of water feels so stupid and clumsy she cries, a little. Leo, her therapist, says she’s too hard on herself.

But the real problem is the winter. A few months ago—she remembers this clearly—she was verdant and hungry and laughed easily with strangers in the park, but as the first autumn chill hit the great lakes, she felt a change come over her, the same change as every year. Every year, she loses the ability to have normal conversations at parties. When the talk lulls she panics and brings up subjects that are too heavy—refugees, the distinct possibility of an earthkilling solar flare—or gets going on a three-hundred-year-old story nobody understands. In autumn people drop off her friends lists at an alarming rate, but because of the change she doesn’t care. Well she does and she doesn’t.

Now it’s February, the worst, most ferocious stretch of winter. The nights are long and the days blink painfully by, and the woman made of water has become convinced that the season will never end, that the world will plod along in this grey, coldlocked funk forever. This makes her angry. February is the month she becomes angry, when acting with consideration toward others feels like something she used to know how to do. They still tell the story about how, driving a friend to the hospital for blood poisoning on Valentines Day, she stopped for a burger. And there was the time with Nali’s Egyptian hairless and the bread oven.

One February, in 1876, the woman made of water got into an argument with a drunk cattle driver in a saloon and filled his lungs with her right arm, which made him dead, then alive again, then dead for good. She has done other things in February, not necessarily in anger. Often it’s loneliness, because the woman made of water gets lonely in the winter, and if she is not responsible in the way she reaches out to others it can cause harm, violence. She does have a power. This is why the woman of water has upped her appointments with Leo to once a week, why she’s on the train on a Tuesday, why she was here to soak this poor girl sitting beside her to the bone. She just needs a little extra help to make it to the thaw, when her urge to lash out will subside and everything will be right again.

The woman made of water hurries home from the station so she doesn’t freeze. The process of freezing is uncomfortable for her, though not fatal. She discovered this a few decades ago, back when she was serious about trying to kill herself.

Inside her apartment, she peels off her layers, exchanging them for a space blanket. She owns three. The space blanket, in her opinion, is the best and most beautiful invention humankind has to its name. It’s the one subject she’s ever had the urge to write a poem about, and she’s witnessed the slow births of red canyons. On the kitchen counter lies a wrinkled notepad with a few blurry lines she’s jotted down: the sheen of sarcophagi / but light as your soufflé.

She goes straight for her computer. Keeping busy is the trick to surviving these long winter nights, to keep from giving in to certain habits. Due to the humidity the woman made of water naturally exudes, her computers last six to eight months and then she buys a new one.

She starts by browsing Twitter, Reddit, Youtube. She never posts, just lurks and looks. She watches a video of a father catching a cake as it slides off a tabletop. She learns giraffes are dying out, selects a new desktop wallpaper, and finds out where certain child actors are now. The tightening digital spiral of nothing listicles and videos gets her to about ten p.m. Then, because she’s cozy and little bored because it already feels like she’s seen the entire internet, she spends a few hours in anonymous chat rooms talking to strangers because, in the winter, it’s better than nothing. These days the rooms are mostly overrun with bots, but eventually she connects with 25/M/Denver, who seems human, and is a whitewater rafting guide.

She enjoys the conversation until 25/M/Denver asks her what she’s wearing. The woman made of water has her space blanket, but in her experience people don’t appreciate it like she does. She considers making up string underwear or something. She’s done that before, typed out fantasies with strangers in chatrooms. The woman made of water has had sex in person, but on screens can be easier, and there’s an unspoken comradeship in it that she likes. They are two people on the faceless internet, which means they are at least partly willing to be lied to, which means they share something from the start. Online, the woman made of water pretends to be a normal woman, with skin and hair, not because she’s ashamed but because it would take a wall of text to get the basic idea across, and then the other person would just log off.

No, not tonight; the thought of masturbation depresses her. She doesn’t say goodbye or sorry, not in the mood. No one does that. She just logs off. Her chat is replaced with a big button asking her if she’d like to start another. 15,863 people are online.

Here, the woman made of water should find another video, or look for jobs, or write another line of the poem, motions to keep her mind at bay. Instead, she accidently does the worst thing and turns away from her screen, where she’s confronted by her dark apartment, her dark things. Not only will this winter never end, the woman made of water thinks, this night will never end. The universe is a cold disk that expands. She knows this.

She thinks about 25/M/Denver. Right now, he’s probably showering or loading another chat. Afterward he will sleep. In the walls of his apartment complex run the pipes, and through those flow dangerous gasses tenuously converted to his side. Everyone in his building could go together at any moment in a communal pile of carbon monoxide victims; as a crowd in the same slow, black shuttle. The woman made of water is different. She isn’t allowed on the shuttle.

This thought spikes her with envy, and she can’t help herself: she goes to the website she knows she shouldn’t. She’s been visiting it far too often this winter. She stops. She walks into the den, but across her studio apartment her screen’s glow still beckons. To combat this she closes her eyes, only she can see through her thin, lapping eyelids.

Some nights, she gets on Facebook, or Instagram, and sees the images of a party she wasn’t invited to, people laughing in a crowded, filthy kitchen. To not be invited stings, but on the other hand, thank god. The saga of the woman made of water is: she’s so lonely she bites the jambs of her doors but also, whenever a get-together is cancelled, her relief is thick.

It’s just the winter, she thinks. In the winter, she simply lacks the language to connect, to get over the everyday humiliation of asking someone to ask for your company. People cannot get over her strangeness and it’s her fault. At parties, she has witnessed people arrive to a general cry of joy. They hug down the line of guests but do not hug the woman made of water. They ask her, instead, how she is doing. About these people, the woman made of water thinks such harsh thoughts as: they probably aren’t capable of lasting, authentic love.

But this is a hypocritical position. Leo would say she’s letting her own stakes get too high again. The woman made of water practices her breathing exercises, which make her calm enough to realize the night will end after all, but there are many hours to go. She approaches her computer slowly and sits down. She’ll take one little look.

She discovered the website earlier that year, a fan site dedicated to her. Well, fan site is the wrong term. Its homepage looks like it was last updated in 1998. Across the top, in bold underline on a tan background, reads: the church of the pure chalice. Beneath the heading is a photo of the woman made of water at a bus stop. She’s wearing a big hiking backpack.

Religions constantly start around the woman made of water. It’s always been like this. People see her and make certain assumptions about truths she must hold. Finding the site was an accident; she immediately wiped her browser history. There are violent incidents on the record involving religions she has been a part of. It’s best to stay far away, especially in the winter.

But tonight she needs something to tide her over. It just feels so good to know there are people out there thinking about her.

She clicks to the forums—pretty dead. The only active threads are a fanart contest with her as the subject, and a discussion by one user claiming to have discovered a description of the woman made of water in an ancient Sumerian text. There are six hundred pages of arguments and amateur translation efforts. The woman made of water knows it’s dangerous to feel touched but she feels touched.

On a page labeled CREED, a paragraph designates the woman made of water as the Pure Chalice, a manifestation of the heartwaters of Mother Earth herself. A mystic embodiment of the highest ideals of purity, of cosmic oneness, the Pure Chalice deserves veneration, protection, and love, and these are hereby named the duties of the Church and its members.

That doesn’t sound so bad, thinks the woman made of water.

Under CONTACT INFORMATION, she finds the phone number of the Church’s high priestess, a woman named Sharon Macintosh. But she stops herself from calling. The woman made of water knows the power she can crackle down a phone line, if she wants to. If she called this priestess, it would make the woman’s life. She’d end up on the next flight to Michigan. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. Sharon Macintosh would chant prayers the whole way to her doom.

The woman made of water closes the tab. It isn’t a church it’s a cult and cults go bad. People go bad too and she hates them. She shuts off her computer and huddles until morning.

At Leo’s office the next week, the woman made of water falls heavily into her chair to let him know it’s going to be a bad one and reports her failure to carry out the homework. She was supposed to invite one person to drinks. The therapist rubs his bald head and looks at her dolefully over the decorative basket of pinecones on his office table. Leo has diagnosed her with social inability and latent anger.

“I told you I don’t like to drink,” she tells him. It’s true; she doesn’t. She hates the way it makes her look. A few beers and she goes from spring clear to an awful urine tint. Wine is okay; a decent red gives her a sort of blush, though creeps hitting on her ask if it’s that time of the month.

Of course, if she really binges, the woman made of water can take on breathtaking hues. She’s been mistaken for a creature of blood, of oil. She has a photograph of herself dancing on a roof, the sun coming through her in lances the deep gold of pilfered honey. The person who took it, an old roommate from New York, had killed herself, in part because of a bone-deep and wrongheaded love.

“As we discussed, it didn’t have to be drinks,” says Leo. “I mentioned drinks as a placeholder for any activity you chose.” Leo is normally sunny. He believes that the woman made of water has the same chance as anyone for meaningful connection, even in the winter, even though she is endless. Today, however, the woman made of water detects the bite of impatience in his expression. “You could have gone to a museum, or seen a movie, a play. Don’t let technicalities get in the way of your fulfillment.”

“I think I’ve been your patient for too long,” says the woman made of water. “I’m starting to recognize your catchphrases.”

“How about we just sit. You know, in companionable silence. Just sit with me. Please.”

“You know, your aversion to therapy is probably indicative of how voluntary your anxiety actually is,” Leo says, gently. “You’re in the middle of a process of self-defeat.”

“Then shouldn’t that process be, like, over already?”

Leo runs a hand down his spade beard. “Okay, fine. We can try a little silence.”

The woman made of water sits back, relieved. Leo is good at taking her out of a certain, frightening place in her head, which is why she’s here, but when he starts speaking to her in dictionary definitions she just wants to go home. She looks idly around the mostly barren office. Leo probably shares the space with a few other private practices to save on rent. On the wall hangs a clock in a porcelain housing shaped like a sleeping cat. It is just the kind of thrift store thing Sharon Macintosh might buy, to keep time as her and her congregation ruminates and sways. The fear, the passion.

Eventually Leo can’t stand the quiet and starts talking about a TV show he’s watching about two Russian spies who pretend to be a married couple in America. Then there are only fifteen minutes left in the session, and the woman made of water keeps Leo at bay by telling him one of the stories she’s stocked up about things people have done to her during bad droughts. He perks right up. Smoke comes off his notepad. It’s funny how easy it is to misdirect him. Lately, Leo’s introduced the word trauma into their discussions. Trauma’s the wrong word, but he hasn’t figured that out yet. The old days of being kept in basements, of being led in pitch of night to ashen lakebeds, were in some ways, a lot of ways, preferable to the current days. Once, a young woman famous for swimming the English Channel held her at gunpoint and tried to wear her like a suit. Another time she caused an entire orchard to bloom and fruit and rot over the course of sixteen hours. Though warned, the field hands ate of the fruit.

When his timer finally goes off, Leo sits back. He looks at her seriously. “Are you feeling hopeful about making it to Spring?” he asks.

“It’s been a hard winter,” says the woman made of water, measuredly.

“How are the anger levels? Are you feeling any ill will toward people? Specifically or in general?” Leo is convinced that her winter outbursts are the result of a deep and specific bitterness, born of the trauma he keeps talking about. He’s also convinced this will be the winter without an outburst, but he says that every year. Outbursts is his word for what happens, though the thing she can do to people is in reality slow and silent and devastating.

“Not ill will,” clarifies the woman made of water.

As they pull on coats to leave, she catches Leo smiling at his phone. On the screen is a picture of an infant, asleep and bulbous in a white knit hat. The resemblance is clear, and she bristles with that same sudden, lockjaw envy she had that night a week ago. When Leo catches her looking, he sleeps his phone. He shudders.

Once, the woman made of water saved the life of a hibachi cook. He’d caught fire lighting his grill for a hooting bachelorette party, and she saw the flash of him ignite across the restaurant. She’d extinguished him by running straight through him, and he was so, so grateful. His sister worked at the restaurant too, and she’d cried she was so thankful.

Only, sometime afterward, the cook went crazy. He somehow got the woman made of water’s address and paced the sidewalk in front of her building, retching and sobbing and calling to her window about waves, the deep ocean he could not stop hearing. It was in him, he cried, the crash and the drip drip drip. It was in him mercilessly. He cried well into the night until someone got fed up and called the cops, who drove the cook away in a cruiser with smoked windows.

This is the episode the woman made of water reminds herself of so she doesn’t do anything stupid, like call the number listed on the Church of the Pure Chalice’s website. She just has to stave off the despair one week until her next session.

The temperature outside stalls below zero, so she doesn’t leave her apartment. To fill the time, she listens to conversations through the walls and checks her mailbox three times a day. She also manages her email inbox, bursting with spam. She gets one non-spam email from a subsidiary of Heckler & Koch, the firearms manufacturer. They have a unique part-time opportunity for her.

Leo has been telling her to get a job for years. It’s a chance to get out of the house, to meet people. Coworkers are just friends waiting to happen, he liked to say. He liked to say, sharing a goal in a workplace can incubate a wonderful intimacy. For a moment the woman made of water is interested, but then she remembers she’ll have to fill out forms, that she’ll soak through copy after copy, the secretary clicking her pen and rolling her eyes.

The sun creeps into her apartment, crawls across the floor in a glowing radiation square, and leaves again. Her popcorn ceiling reverberates with the deep vowels of Russian TV, and she listens to the long stillnesses between when the very old man watching gets up and canes to the bathroom or to the fridge for a PBR, or the tinny ring of him throwing an empty to the floor. Getting her mail, the sorority girls and graduate students she meets don’t look at her but also don’t look away. They stare straight ahead, hats dusted with snow.

Fiction

Deity

Noelle Chung

Smoker II

Kerry Desrochers

foreplay

Klara Kuemmerle

everything's a winner you know when you
die. and then there's that giraffe
yip yip         yip yip!
now THAT's finally done let's get back
to christmas why not? it is a public affair
hobnob you. porcupines in heaven what
will they think of you who knows? own it you
idiot gopher haha. sorry. i'll give your present
away this summer. it is a hell of a summer
sandwich and all haha oh. not a joke. deny it
you crumb bum you must love me you
do it often enough. and who doesn't want to
touch me too who doesn't? end. go and buy a
sandwich store you are. haha now THAT's funny.
okay meant for giraffes. which i disdain
as much as you do.
                                       reasons i will not disclose
i'm old now.


porcupines in heaven

Gabby McClellan

Goldfish bags in her hands, the kinds won at carnivals, shifting all at once like sand. How long has it been, she wonders, gripping the jelly-like sacks, how long has she missed the feeling. Laminated posters on nondescript beige walls advertise buttock enhancements and tummy tucks and something called the Mommy Makeover. Labiaplasty, liposuction, a whole slew of lifts, adjustments, and removals painted in violent fleshy inks: skin as an artistic palette, bodies to be revised and refined with glinting silver scalpels by square-jawed doctors. Does he think he is an artist, she wonders, staring at the pentagonal face of her surgeon, does reshaping a nipple or labia count as art. Her palms are sweating. Have these been inside someone, sliced and fished from the shallows of an armpit incision before they were handed to her?

The room is unlike any doctor’s office she has ever seen before: dim lighting, vague and purple, maybe for minimizing pores and smoothing cellulite. She was up late the night before, throwing a party she didn’t want to host. Deep bags under her eyes darken beneath smeared mascara and blue eyeliner. The unfamiliarity of heaviness and stickiness stretches her skin like overworked taffy. She hasn’t worn makeup in over a year.

She asks which one is better, which one is more popular. Two different things. Her breath is hot and she burps cabernet-soaked lemon cake. Self-disregard and shabbiness must be common in this office: here she has come to the doctor of the human aspect, the artist whose palette is flesh.

The doctor wheels around in his leather stool and tells her about saline, something that can pop and leak into the chest if not properly inserted, while she looks back and forth from either implant. This one is more structured, the doctor says, holding his hand over the firmer jellyfish head, and this one, the silicone mushroom cap, is said to feel more like natural breast tissue. Usually women go for the round implants, but there’s also the smooth kind, and if you want I can show you the gummy bear one too, maybe another option if you’re looking for something more form-stable.

Like shopping at a car dealership. She closes her eyes and tightens her hands around both. Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown the party the night before her consult. A massive celebration of her continuing marriage, a self-congratulations for her and her husband for their white-knuckled grit and determination. Denise and Tom, look, you’ve made it! Something akin to a middle-aged participation trophy, if those could be offered with dancing: a gelatinous squirming of aging bodies on the patio-turned-dancefloor, most of those bodies on the verge of sexual dysfunctions, cardiovascular issues, and various organ collapses, likely livers or kidneys. Blood vessels pumping diuretics, beta blockers, alpha blockers, atorvastatin, rosuvastatin, sildenafil, tadalafil, maybe a trace amount of benzodiazepines or expired barbiturates. Anything to keep their bodies going.

The party had been loud and sweaty and sickening. An excess of jubilance. George and Tina, a couple from the neighborhood, wore cable knits and khaki pants that quickly stained from sweat. Wicker deck chairs and Adirondacks from the lawn adapted permanent sheens from the many guests very soon after the party started. A massive undertaking, the party: forty or fifty people, all shoved side-by-side like sardines in their narrow townhouse on the lake, making heat waves that consumed their neighbors’ houses. Many of the guests were secondary or tertiary friends of the couple, which, at their age, meant they were no better than strangers. Most brought flowers or bottles of wine or cheese plates. Denise had worn a short strappy dress that hugged her chest and she made sure to drink two heaping glasses of wine before anything had really picked up because she didn’t want to feel self-conscious. The dress hadn’t been worn in a long time. She spent her night floating in a pleasant drunkenness, accepting compliments from friends and strangers on the hydrangea arrangements lining the patio tables and the hanging paper lanterns along the deck. She didn’t speak to her husband once. A man she had dated in high school chatted her up, telling her she looked healthy, something she hadn’t believed in a while for various reasons. He also said the food was good. Sitting in the doctor’s office now, bloat warming her belly like a curled-up chinchilla, she wonders if she went overboard; the guests didn’t eat all the food. Surely she put out too much food.

She had developed a fascination with feeding people in the wake of her illness. The offerings at the party were aplenty: punch in an assortment of vintage cut-glass bowls afforded by her husband’s high financier salary, fruit tarts filled with stiff cream from a local bakery, crackers assembled in an optical illusion around a blue dish of Ossetra Sturgeon caviar. Pigs in blankets, triple-decker clubs, pasta salad, egg salad, potato salad, cucumber salad. Red and blue Jell-O cut into stars to celebrate the Fourth of July even though they were a month out and there would be no fireworks. Malbec, cabernet, pinot, a finale of Perignon and Prosecco and anything fizzing they could fish from the coolers. And cake, a delicious three-decker. Cheers to Denise and Tom, whoopee for their endurance, how they must have clawed and cleaved their way here.

Her memory before the party is warm, too warm, because she preferred the thermostat at seventy-five in that year-long prison of her bedroom. She could have been lying dead in a tomb, allowed out only for doctor’s visits.

The party broke the comfort of her soporific haze. She had been counting time not by days but by the confinement of her illness: stage one, too weak to leave the bedroom; stage two, the steady deterioration of her muscles and sleep; stage three, occasional walks and arguments with her husband, which she claimed the capecitabine heightened, no matter what the doctors at the Women’s Clinic said.

The plastic surgeon now says Denise, do you have any questions, do you need me to go over everything again for you. She blinks, seeing not the doctor’s office but the swollen water pouch on the ceiling above her bed, the thing she had stared at for months on end. For a while she thought it looked like the belly of a pregnant snake, white with gray and yellow rings, before she determined it was more a spider’s egg sac. Something fertile that made her squirm on the mattress below in the somnolent fevers between hours-long naps.

She gives the implants one final squeeze. Part of her wants to pop one and let the saline spill over her hands. Maybe she’ll squeeze hard enough; all the dancing the night before had assured her that she had reclaimed some of her missing strength.

She tells the doctor she’ll have to think about it, she doesn’t want to be rash. Did people usually make these decisions in a day, she wonders, decisions regarding the shape and texture and filling of their breasts? The doctor says she is being reasonable. Waiting is always the reasonable thing to do. Somehow this comment makes her want to pick the saline one and shake it at him, tell him she’ll take it now, he could put her under now and slip this in the pear-skin layers of flesh, wrap the jelly in the blanket of her cut and recut chest.

At the receptionist’s desk she scrolls through her phone to schedule the follow-up and surgery. The waiting room, populated by sluggish bodies awaiting their surgical rebirth, is full of people without interesting faces. Maybe the patients in a plastic surgeon’s office ought to have their deformities and insecurities painted in their smiles. But their eyes, noses, lips – all of it is transitory.

She looks at the calendar. Around this time last year Tom announced he was having an affair. She was pouring him coffee at the kitchen table and he cleared his throat, telling her thank you, she’d poured him enough, do we have any half and half left, also I’m having an affair. A woman at work. Denise stopped pouring the coffee and sat down and glanced at the oven clock. Eight-oh-five. A blink and her mind passed through faces from the holiday party six months or so before: the blond one with wide hips, the tall brunette with giraffe knobby knees, or that older one, the stoic beauty who wore silk tie-front blouses on the floor above his office – this one, she thought, this woman with white jets in her hair, this must be the one, she looked as if she wore expensive perfume.

Her husband said the affair was over in between bites of toast, it had only lasted a short while. Then he said the coffee, the dark, syrupy stuff Denise had made in the new Moka, this was the best coffee he’d ever had.

She nodded. Her toast was burnt so she scraped her knife until a pile of black ash formed on her plate. A fly was tapping against the window, an unacknowledged suicide attempt. The faucet dripped and she absentmindedly wondered if a pipe was leaking and if her husband had asked the woman to fuck him or if the woman asked him, or maybe everything happened naturally and he just found himself inside of her, as if by accident. By the time she finished spreading grape jam Tom pushed in his chair and said he would be late for work if he didn’t leave now, we can talk later if you like, although I might be home after dinner. Business meeting.

As she now flicks through her phone she imagines him with the older woman, maybe he’s in his office chair and she’s straddling him, her thighs boa-constrictor thick, her arms and belly plump and marshmallow-soft, her hair black and jolted by white, the same things she imagined over and over again while staring at the bulge in the ceiling in her bedroom. She tells the receptionist, Sandy, that a follow-up in August would be great, and maybe shoot for surgery in September. There is no need to rush, she says. Sandy seems relieved.

The night Tom had promised to discuss his infidelity had been humid, an amplified reminder of their swamp-borne D.C. suburb, and she fell asleep with sheets sticking to her legs. When Tom got home he watched her for a minute or two, standing at the foot of the bed in a charcoal suit from Bloomingdales and a cloud of Armani Eau du Toilette. They wouldn’t talk for three months.

His work got busy when her doctor’s appointments started. She tracked this time backwards, counting down from the morning in June in a calendar, writing 

 alongside reminders of appointments. The refrigerator broke a few times and yesterday before the party she reread old notes about spoiled milk and bad eggs next to 

Three months after his confession she learned there was something invasive in her skin and the woman sleeping with her husband was not a secretary but a boss. Her husband eventually corrected her – 

 – and said he understood if she didn’t want to stay with him, he could move out, they could unwind the knots of their marriage, maybe cut them if they were too tight. When he said these things his eyes widened and rolled around in their sockets like dinosaur eggs, marbled and stone-looking, heavy as if they might pop out and crack on the floor.

She told him she didn’t want a divorce. Would he come to the doctor with her?

Invasive ductal carcinoma, clumps of bad cells in the milk duct, something very common. Very common, she repeated back to the doctor, nothing too difficult, then. She listened to the diagnosis without blinking, absorbing osmotically words like cytotoxic and lymph nodes, never digesting anything. Her diagnosis lay under her skin. Very common, she thought, my life is very common. She never had children but she suspected that if she had been young and maternal she would have felt more devastated; this doctor must see lots of tears, she thought, maybe he thinks something’s wrong with me. She never had any of those maternal inklings, so this cancer of her milk ducts – both the right and the left – felt like an adaptation, as if her body had decided to pursue its own evolutionary track.

Four months passed since Tim’s confession and the refrigerator still hadn’t been replaced. Though her husband couldn’t miss too much work he did his best to go to the doctor’s appointments with her. She often rereads her diary, a habit she developed a few weeks ago; one morning slot tells of a thrown-away chemise nightgown, a lovely lace thing ruined by vomit. A few days before the party she traced her fingers fondly over the written memory, recalling how Tom had walked her to the shower and thrown the comforter by her feet as warm water stuck thin fabric to her skin, how he made scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast after she’d been sick. She hadn’t felt so close to him in a long time.

She can’t remember when she started asking him to keep flowers in her bedroom because she didn’t write this in her diary. Driving home from the plastic surgeon’s appointment, she thinks maybe it was then, in that narrow slip of time between her first chemo treatment and the day she asked her husband if his boss had a better body than her, that she gently suggested he keep flowers in the celadon vase sitting on the old credenza and move the vase to their bedroom. The walls in their room were gray and the comforter was eggshell-colored and she thought flowers would help. He never answered her question about his boss but he took the Mercedes to the Whole Foods on Maple Avenue, not the one on Sunrise Valley because it wasn’t as nice, and returned with a large bouquet of hyacinths and tulips and chrysanthemums. And so began a new era of her illness: the era of flowers. She smiles now, turning the car onto the Toll Road West, thinking of all the flowers people brought to the party last night. As if all the dead flowers accrued over eight or nine months had to be replaced at once.

When Tom went to the appointments with her she would talk about the first few months after they met, most of the time filling silence while they were in the car or waiting room. They met at a party at a school neither of them attended; they both went to expensive liberal arts colleges, the kinds where students walk across well-fertilized quads with chai tea lattes and copies of Marx under their arms, and the partying scene had been tepid, unfulfilling of their mild appetites. She had a cold at the party and kept wiping her runny nose on the hem of her mesh black shirt, a see-through thing her mother would’ve opposed. On the way to an appointment she asked him if he remembered her outfit that night.

He said sorry, he didn’t remember the outfit then, but he remembered asking his friends if any of them knew her. None of them did.

She thought for a moment. No, maybe they didn’t; maybe they just saw each other, maybe they danced a little. The music would’ve been too loud to talk.

The hospital housing the cancer clinic was close to a shopping mall, the largest shopping mall in the state, and each time they passed the Macy’s and Nordstrom, marble and obsidian tombs, she thought of the rows and rows of clothing and shoes and healthy people, everything an explosion of color, kaleidoscopes of light and shuffling feet and reflective tile floors and ruddy, blood-filled cheeks. As appointments progressed she started asking him about their first dates, where he took her, the food they ate, their mutual friends. Laura and Mike, another couple at their party the night before, had only recently gotten married, but Tom and Denise had been the ones to introduce them all those years ago.

I asked you if you liked kids on our second date.

She laughed. Yes, she told him, she had said that she didn’t like them. At the time they both agreed, laughing, neither weighing her words as a prophecy, both assuming, like most people, they would grow up, get married, pop out a few kids, and retire neatly and quietly. Even though she never wanted kids she pictured herself with children, as if having a family was something inescapable in the grayness of suburbia.

She latched herself onto Tom fairly quickly because her mother died a few months after they started dating and he was the only one who managed to comfort her without making her angrier. A bad car accident, a rear-end gone horribly wrong in a bitter twist of fate, and Denise had no mother; her father would die later, twenty years down the line, of a stroke. A year after her mother died Tom lost his first cousin, someone like a brother to him. His turn, the universe seemed to say. By the end of college she and Tom had embedded themselves like twin parasites inside each other, unable to conceive of a world where they and their grief were separate.

Driving down the Toll Road, flying at ninety-two in a fifty-five, she now wonders if she really wants breasts, if there is any reason to have the surgery. Her body rejected itself; her body made a decision. And she is not getting divorced. The party had assured her of this fact. Amid all the dancing she had fixated on the moving bodies, on the bobbing beer bellies in button-downs and pendulous breasts in thin satin camisoles, leather-loafered feet shuffling out of step to Funky Town and one-inch heels burrowing blisters into ankles like mole rats. Guests over and over again said she looked healthy, and she felt awkward and said they looked healthy too, not knowing what else to say. She wanted their skin, their sagging flesh, their adipose-coated organs, their year’s worth of soft pretzels on the National Mall and tagliatelle at Cooper’s Hawk and lamb gyros from the Persian kebab truck that parked outside their neighborhood. All of these things, she thought, watching husbands and wives, had been eaten together, couples united by food, each matching the other calorie-for-calorie. Only at a party celebrating a marital armistice would she notice how many of her friends were married and fat, two things that had felt alien for nearly a year.

The six months following Tom’s confession had passed faster than the first three months because she couldn’t track time properly while sick. At six months the doctor told her things were not getting better and they should try a more rigorous approach. This news was somehow the final cut, the final slice severing her from Tom after a slow scraping along in the same house. Everything had been painful and awkward, but she had made it that way: like skinning a snake with her bare hands, peeling back the diamond-patterned leather, exposing pale pink reptilian tenderloin; this was her doing. But the skin had snagged, catching at the neck, taking forever to let loose. The doctor’s news was quick, sharp: a shovel taken to the snake head. If anything Denise’s anger at the news was jealousy; she was jealous the doctor finished the job she had started. When she and Tom had gotten home from the appointment she floated through the house, detached as if she had been lobotomized, and eventually fell asleep on the couch, too weak to walk up the many flights of stairs to their bedroom. She dreamed of tabletops and boards and flat wooden spatulas.

A few days after the news she told Tom she would divorce him if he would just wait for this whole thing to be over. In her diary, scrawled underneath 

Refrigerator guy coming on the fourth of December

, red pen spells the impending doom of a marriage. She would make him wait, she would make him watch the hourglass suck itself dry.

The surgery on the eleventh of February was pink and red. Not from blood or breast tissue or the pinkish stuff whistling up suction tubes held in body cavities; no, pink and red from the Valentine’s Day decorations in the outpatient center. Hearts cut out from construction paper and chocolate and lollipop-filled candy bowls and red roses, maybe fake or maybe real, and strings of pink garlands festooning every corner. People in the waiting room looked at Denise and Tom with the same look you give elderly dogs. Happy Valentine’s Day said over and over and over again, pouring from strangers’ mouths and eyes as they watched the brittle woman wearing the scarf shuffle across the off-white tile, leaning on her husband like a baby sloth clinging to its mother.

After the surgery she didn’t want to look at Tom, or maybe she didn’t want him to look at her. In her diary she wrote of the two removals with the same nonchalance she would use to describe the peeling of an orange: the smooth surface of her chest, wrapped in gauze like pith; her husband’s pale gaze after he started sleeping on the couch, leaving half the mattress flat as his body’s impression refilled with air and time.

She wanted the house cleaned every Sunday, a routine she had maintained for their near twenty-five years of marriage. While she lay in bed, recovering in a fuzzy bubble of Percocet and a new lavender comforter, she told him the house had to be spotless. Floors vacuumed, scrubbed, polished. Laundry folded in the linen closet. Marble countertops wiped with Windex and bathtubs and toilets soaked in bleach. She didn’t add things that hadn’t been done before. She was a meticulous person, maybe a germaphobe, and she had never trusted a cleaning lady to do everything for them. Eyes closed, chest heavy in gauze but not fat, she told him on the Wednesday after her surgery that the house would have to be cleaned every Sunday.

She pulls off the Toll Road and onto Sunset Hills. Exhaustion and hunger teeter back and forth while her hands clutch the leather steering wheel. Her bad dreams started within the last few months; if she forgets to swallow the handful of suggested benzodiazepines before bed she’ll dream of terrifying things. Shopping for bras with her dead mother, a strange amalgam of a torturous puberty and a rainy funeral, recurred with different twists, variations on a nightly theme. She and her mother as teenagers sifting through lace lingerie; she as an adult, her mother an old woman, each holding thongs and G-strings in mock fascination; she as she is now, with a shirt flapping forward and back, her mother a corpse, rotting skin peeling and leaving trails between 34C and D. After the party she had been too exhausted to remember anything, never mind wiping off her makeup or fully unzipping the dress or brushing her teeth, and she had forgotten to take the pills.

Through the remainder of winter and over the course of the wet and humid spring she had started speaking to Tom about plans moving forward. Did he want the townhouse or should she move into the one up the street, the pretty white brick one that had just gone on the market. Would he mind if she cut back the azaleas in the back garden because he had done a poor job of it. Maybe she would get a cat or a little dog, one of those barky things divorcees bought. He answered all of her questions by shrugging and apologizing. Eventually she stopped talking about the future. She did, after all, have cancer.

Soon friends started suspecting their marital rift, seeing the visible depression between the couple, something beyond, they thought, a side effect of invasive ductal carcinomas. Denise did little to suppress the rumors. Tom did little to stop Denise from discussing his infidelity. In fact he spoke to her infrequently, shuffling around the house with trays of food and orange juice like a hired caretaker. Any time he entered their bedroom – her bedroom – he averted his gaze, searching for something pleasant amid the moribund walls and slumped figure. On occasion he would apologize, and on occasion she would ask him for tea or magazines. If she was feeling well enough she would ask him to walk with her. These walks were painful, but not in any physical sense: usually the wind would push and sweep her shirt, which sometimes made her cry.

One morning in April, a day when the rain had stopped but the ground remained sodden and smelled of fertile soil, Denise was lying in bed when the bubble above the ceiling popped. Gray water fell in a single sheet. The new lavender comforter, the mattress, the Tempur-Pedic pillows — everything made dirty sponges in an instant. The single slice along the overstretched paint skin cut neatly like the letter C. She stared at the C for a few minutes while metallic-smelling water dripped from the split ends of her hair.

Tom came downstairs and said through the closed door that he couldn’t find whatever he had been looking for in the attic, there were too many boxes and none of them were labeled, the only labeled ones being their wedding photos and albums from the first ten years of their marriage. Then she answered and said that was fine, there was no rush. She looked at the celadon vase on the side table. Dead bearded irises with brown rotting heads like the faces of old beagles, clumpy and stinky, drooped over the lip of the vase.

Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Winter 2022 - Jellyfish Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Poetry • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Another Swan

Poetry • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

foreplay

Poetry • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Hoping for an Opening

Poetry • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

porcupines in heaven

Fiction • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Deity

Art • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Untitled

Art • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Terra Nova

Fiction • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Silicone

Art • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Dog Day (Sehnsucht Series)

Art • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

sublunary

Art • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Outside My Certain Sight (Sehnsucht Series)

Art • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Smoker II

Art • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Untitled